Why Left-Wing Radicals Want to Feed the Beast

Some would-beradicals are demanding
that rich people and corporations like Starbucks and U2 pay more taxes, and
they’re getting noisy about it. I can see why your garden variety liberal
might trust the government with U2’s money more than they’d trust U2, but I
don’t really get why the out-in-the-street direct-action crowd would waste
their time on such silliness.

Szmonko acknowledges a “tension” between “knowing that the
U.S. government has
[done] and continues to do a tremendous amount of harm, and believing that we
still need to fight like hell for the parts of it that redistribute wealth and
strengthen our ability to build up resilient and resistant community.” The
question, Szmonko thinks, is this:

How can we move from an understanding that government is bad and we shouldn’t
fund it, into an understanding that the parts of the government that are
designed to hurt people are bad, and parts of the government that are
designed to support people are deeply flawed, but can help us build power
toward the world we want?

You will probably notice right away that this is a false dichotomy. The fact
that there are parts of the government that are designed to support people and
that these parts could be reformed and made better and can even be used as
valuable tools in their present form does not contradict the fact
that the government is bad and we shouldn’t fund it. Both of these statements
can be true, and, indeed, have been true for every repulsive government that
has ever been. I’m sure Nazi taxpayers were proud of the kindergartens they
purchased along with their concentration camps, for example.

Szmonko looks at the problems we’re having, such as things that make it
“harder for poor and working people globally to survive capitalism” and
attributes these problems to a shrinking of government. But government has not
been shrinking. It has been relentlessly, cancerously growing.
Government expenditures have been steadily increasing in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars for decades.
If infrastructure is decaying and social services are getting worse while
prisons are expanding and the military is extending its global ambitions and
Orwellian snoops are reading our email — this isn’t because government is
getting smaller under the influence of some supposed right-wing plot to
discredit government, but because the government sucks, and when you give it
money you get crap in return: the more money, the more crap.

You already know that the government works on behalf of wealthy elites. It
socializes their risks and subsidizes their gains; it underwrites their
“corporate persons” and their economic transactions; it fights wars on their
behalf; it twists the arms of foreign governments to give them free rein to
extend their economic empires; its regulations restrict our opportunities,
making many parts of the economy off-limits to people of limited means, and
forcing most of us to beg to be their employees on their terms; and even its
benign-seeming social safety net helps the biggest and wealthiest companies
like WalMart get away with offering bargain basement wages and benefits nobody
would accept if the government weren’t there to backstop them.

If the government really were about to go out of business, it would be the
wealthy elites — including these so-called “anti-government
conservatives” — who would be the first to howl. They are not enemies of the
government — they depend on it. They wouldn’t last long without it.

Knowing this, why do you want to further empower the government by giving it
more money? Do you really imagine that as you force the rich to pay more,
you’ll simultaneously be able to force them to cede their power to the rest of
us, reform the politicians into noble and good people, and rewrite generations
of laws that have been written on behalf of elites — and all of this quickly
enough so that this new money the government gets from the rich, thanks to
your efforts, doesn’t get spent on the awful crap the government usually
spends it on? Good luck with that. How about this: if you think it’ll be so
easy, fix the government this year and start taxing the rich next year. Then
I won’t be so skeptical.

If I learn tomorrow that the
CEO of
Oil Slicks and Sweatshops Unlimited has figured out some crafty way to avoid
paying any income tax on his $34 gazillion salary, you know what I’m going to
think? Good for him!: That’s what I’m going to think. Because I don’t
care how many limousines he buys, how many golf rounds he enjoys, how many
cigars he lights up with how many $100 bills — he’s not torturing prisoners of
war, conducting wars around the world, encircling the globe with military
bases, imprisoning millions of people, or blackmailing humanity with the
everpresent threat of nuclear holocaust, the way the recipient of such taxes
does. I hope he avoids his taxes next year too.

How can you complain about rich people who invest their money in things like
“war, prisons, policing, surveillance, immigration detention, and extreme
exploitation of the global workforce” and in the same breath demand that the
rich pay more federal taxes — which is just another way of investing in
exactly the same set of evils?

There are hundreds of organizations that need your support — the government is
one of the worst-managed ones with one of the worst returns-on-investment. If
you could wrest money from the rich to give to any project you could, you’d be
a fool to choose the government. The difference is that the government, unlike
other projects, really has the power to wrest the money away. But this
violent, coercive power is exactly what we should be setting our sights
against, not making alliances with or trying to bargain with! The government’s
power to seize money from whom it chooses goes hand in hand with its power to
assassinate people with drones, put millions behind bars, extend its empire,
wiretap the world, and monopolize the economy. It is a violence and oppression
that undergirds the rest of its violence and oppression.

Szmonko also argues:

If the government were providing for more of our needs, more people could
focus their energy on organizing. Less people would be afraid to take risks
because of tremendous personal debt. We could shift away from being on the
defensive.

I don’t find this scenario very likely. Are people more likely or less likely
to come together and organize against government corruption and evil if they
depend on that same government for their livelihoods? Are people more likely
or less likely to be afraid to take risks challenging the government the more
dependent on that government they become? Szmonko’s position as a whole is
itself a good example of how when people become used to the idea of being
provided for by the government they become less willing to resist it and more
willing to make excuses for it.

I would extend Szmonko’s advice: Resist the call to shift your focus from
building grassroots power either to the non-profit industrial complex
or to the government welfare system. Pleading for the government to
help us is a project that distracts us from the crucial project of working
together and helping each other to build a resilient and resistant community.

Turn your back on the government and its half-hearted social programs. They’re
too covered with blood to be supported honorably. Instead of giving your money
to the government and then fighting for a bigger slice of it to come back in
the support of good causes — give to the good causes directly! Instead of
hoping to convince the government to extract more from the rich and wishing
for some of it to trickle down to good causes, turn your backs on the
government and the rich and turn all of your attention instead to
building the economy you want with the people around you.

Do you want more direct grassroots democracy? The Occupy movement showed how
it could be done, from the grassroots and not by begging government
to reform itself — so put your taxes and your loyalty there! Do you want more
support for homeowners suffering foreclosure? Retire their debt yourself via
the Strike Debt! project! You want the
library to be open longer? Pay your taxes directly there, or use the hours you
have stopped using to earn money for the government to operate a library of
your own!

What if we were to stop pretending that we can mold the government into
something noble and good? What if instead, we embarked on building noble and
good institutions of our own and decided to pledge our allegiance (and our
resources) to them — the allegiance (and resources) we used to give to the
government before we learned that it cannot be supported any longer?

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